Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Transcribing English to Japanese

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

This is a useful topic, however it belongs on Wikibooks, so delete. John Vandenberg 09:49, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Transcribing English to Japanese

Instruction manual which has been imported to Wikibooks. BirgitteSB 17:11, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete - Basically a How-to guide. ◄Zahakiel► 18:17, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete per WP:NOT#HOWTO. GlassCobra (Review) 22:22, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Japan-related deletions. —Fg2 00:37, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Please provide a link to the imported article on Wikbooks. There is no article with this title there. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 01:04, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • b:Transwiki:Transcribing English to Japanese--BirgitteSB 15:13, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: This is a strange article, and not only because it's titled unidiomatically (according to my idiolect, at least) and misleadingly. But it's even stranger as a "how-to". It seems less a how-to-do than a description of how-it-has-been-done, where "it" is less a matter of orthography than the formation of one stratum of the Japanese lexicon. Also, while it's earnest and gets a lot of stuff right, it makes some elementary goofs, talking about "phonetic" transcription when it seems to mean phonemic [within English phonology] transcription (it even uses slashes). I know next to nothing of Wikibooks but don't think that this is revisable into an "instruction manual" if you take that term to mean "howto guide"; if on the other hand "instruction manual" includes "textbook" and you want a textbook of a minor aspect of Japanese, something could be derived from this. -- Hoary 03:54, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - You're right in your assessment of the article, but yes... textbooks are also covered by the WP:NOT#HOWTO concept; WP:NOT#TEXT also links to the same place. The only difference between this and an overt guidebook is that it's not written in the second person. All you have to do is substitute, "this is how it is done," with "this is how you do it," and the problem becomes clear. ◄Zahakiel► 15:10, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• Looking at wikilinks to this, many of them are to give more information about phonetic shifts when English words are transliterated to Japanese. Clearly, there's some need for an article that does that. Keep and edit to remove the instructional framing but keep explanation of the sound changes, with examples. (I'd be bold and offer to do it myself but, not knowing Japanese, I'd butcher it.) —Quasirandom 16:58, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.